Anonymous’ striking identity for A Design Film Festival

When there’s a design-themed film festival, you have a certain expectation for the branding of said festival to be executed perfectly. I imagine it’s similar to a gymnastics coach nervously watching their child protégé at their first big comp. We can all breathe a sigh of relief though as Singapore-based studio Anonymous have stuck the landing with this effortlessly cool and slick identity.

In its fourth year, A Design Film Festival was created by Anonymous themselves, and this year’s theme On a Scale of Art to Design considers “scale” less as a measure and more as a spectrum for creative work in all its various forms.

The whole vibe is quietly dramatic combining simple elements to make something that’s bold and striking. The use of stripes and spots and different sized lettering really breaks up the text to give movement to the identity. And black backgrounds with dark grey type and a smattering of spot varnishing works wonderfully as a backdrop for something which promises to be a real exploration of design through a different medium.

Forward Festival takes place in Vienna, Munich and Zurich and brings together creatives from all over the world. Having created the identity for 2016, Studio Zwupp was commissioned again for this year’s festival, and took the phrase “birth of an idea” as its inspiration. Combining type and illustration, a collection of abstract shapes allude to this notion of germination. The studio has animated parts of the identity, which again highlights this idea of growing and movement, and maintains an air of ambiguity.

“As a teen I loved the skateboard magazine Lodown from Berlin and before I even knew why I was attracted to it, I had decided it was what I wanted to do,” says Switzerland-born graphic designer Anna Haas. Whilst growing up in the small town of Fribourg, Anna first developed a love for books whilst working at a monastery where she was taught book restoration and repair. She later went on to study illustration and upon graduating began working as a freelance graphic designer and illustrator. Her work is an accomplished and slick portfolio that ranges from editorial design to visual identities and explores the world of art, culture and commerce.

On a rainy Paris morning, I met with Mathias Augustyniak and Michael Amzalag, the namesakes of renowned agency M/M (Paris), at their studio in the 10th, beside Canal Saint-Martin. Greeted by Michael’s Siberian Husky called Indy, we settled at the table of their meeting room, adjacent to the studio, where individual workspaces line two walls, a long, communal table forms the main drag, and skylights, dappled with raindrops, illuminate the room.

When working at a music store as a teenager, Bradley Pinkerton used to keep notes on who designed what covers and put them on display in front of other records that were being sold a the time. “Working there and being exposed to album art got me passionate about design,” he says and after being told about graphic design as a career by a school councillor, it seemed like a natural path.

Surface Multiples: Hiding in Plain Sight, is a series of projects by Royal College of Art graduate Alex Fergusson. Whilst creating work exploring ornamental language and symbolism in contemporary architecture, Alex began to notice buildings masked with digital printed imagery of architectural facades – often with no relationship to the building it covers. It was this sense of irony that first prompted the Surface Multiples series. “The element of humour and pantomime expressed through these temporary architectures was my initial interest, and as the project progressed I realised that the multiplications of surface (of this kind) are not only limited to architectural facades, but also the built environment, in particular construction sites across London.”